[RightInEastLansing]

My big bang comment was relevant to a comment that I neglected to include in my post. Sorry.

By the way aren't all cosmology books essentially "lay-mans" books? I have read a few, and am always left with an empty feeling.

[Ignatius J Reilly]

"By the way aren't all cosmology books essentially "lay-mans" books? I have read a few, and am always left with an empty feeling."

No, there are many scholarly works that without a very good understanding of some very complex math are incomprehensible to most. Math is the language physicists use to describe the universe because english is just not adequate to describe the concepts. A have taken graduate level differential geometry and am unable to follow much of what leading researchers in that field are studying.